Thanks for the answers guys, but I still don’t really understand how sound can go at the speed of light, and IMO I think it took a lot longer than we think.
Don’t believe me? Imagine we have no advanced tech that we have today, and across world voice calls don’t exist. Imagine how fucking difficult it would be to make the sound of your voice go at light speed across Earth.
For example imagine you’re at a park with your friend and across world vc’s don’t exist. You’re speaking to each other through the pipe with the two cups at each end, and you want to invent a way to communicate across the world
The fact they did it is awesome. It sounds impossible. And at the time I have no doubt the majority of the world thought it was impossible. But we always think it’s impossible, until it’s invented.
OP below
I always thought that the sound travels at the speed of light but then it hit me that it’s not light, it’s sound, so I had to post this.
OP above
Edit: It’s technically still sound though right? Just converted into something else.
Just because it’s converted into a different form doesn’t mean it’s not sound. It’s just sound in a different form, or it wouldn’t be sound at the other end.
Who was the first person to convert sound to the speed of light?
Edit2: I still think there’s something you’re not telling me guys 🤔😂
Edit3: to the few haters who downvoted my reply to the comment when I said ‘no shit’ when someone compared this to paper travelling at the speed of light, get a brain. Sound doesn’t weigh anything.
Edit4: u/mitchrsmert fr? If sound has mass how can it travel at the speed of light?
In: 627
Other people have answered your question that sound can be converted into digital, so I’ll go one further: almost everything you can think of can be converted into digital data and then sent over wires at the speed of light.
We start with the concept of digital data. For most technology, digital means converting information into binary, or some combination of 1’s and 0’s. This allows us to represent information as a series of high voltages (1’s) and low voltages (0’s) to allow it to be sent over a wire.
The first concept to digitize is the concept of integers. We can make them binary by changing them to base 2. 13 in base 10 can be thought of as 10 + 3. However, it is also 8 + 4 + 1, which gives us the binary number 1101.
Next is the concept of negative integers. The easy but not quite accurate way to explain them is we put a 1 at the front if it is negative and a 0 at the front if it is positive. When dealing with digital concepts, you usually deal with a fixed number of 1’s or 0’s, usually in groups of 8. So 5 is 00000101 and -5 is 10000101. The reason this isn’t quite accurate is if we did it this way, then we would have both 0 and -0, and that’s not ideal. So we slightly modify by shifting the negative numbers using a concept called two’s complement that I won’t get into.
Next is the concept of non-integer numbers, which we call floats. To encode 8.3 into binary, we think of it as 83 * 10^-1. Then, we encode the 83 and the -1 to binary separately and then combine them into one binary block. Like negative numbers, I’m glossing over some details so it’s not completely accurate but this should be enough for you to get the idea.
Next is the concept of text, which we call strings. Text started with ASCII, which used 7 bits to describe the English alphabet and numbers. ASCII uses a lookup table, so a capital A is 65, or 1000001. Eventually we created Unicode, which is 32 bits instead of 7. Unicode has three different versions, one is 32 bits per character, one is 16 bits per chunk with a character being one or two chunks, and one is 8 bits per chunk with a character being 1-4 chunks.
Finally, when you are a software programmer like I am, you make your own “datatypes”. A datatype is a mapping from a concept to how to represent it in binary. However, almost everything you make is going to be a combination of integers, floats, bools, and strings.
So to answer your question, for sound, you need some device to convert the information of sound into a series of integers. These integers are then converted into binary 1’s and 0’s, and then sent over a wire. A 1 is sent over the wire using high voltage and a 0 is sent over the wire using low voltage. The other side gets this information, converts it back into binary 1’s and 0’s, and then has digital speakers that are able to read the 1’s and 0’s and use them figure out what sounds to emit.
Think of it this way – if you scan a paper document, then email it to the other side of the world and it gets printed out, you have not just made paper travel round the would in 5 mins.
You convert your sound into electricity, and then back to sound. Electricity moves near the speed of light.
Microphones and speakers do the same thing, but backwards. They both convert electrical pulses to sound, and vice versa. In analogue systems, the microphone has a tiny diaphragm (like a tiny speaker) that vibrates with the sound waves, and moves a magnet over a coil, making an analog electrical signal out of sound waves. The opposite process happens on the other end, with the signal being pulses/waves that vibrate a magnet, that vibrates the diaphragm to then make sound. It’s a little more complex with digital, but the general idea is the same. You take a sound wave, turn it into an electric/digital code, and then reverse the process on the other end.
Because it’s not “sound” it’s information in the form of electrical pulses that last less than a billionth of a second each and they’re traveling through glass for a large portion of the journey and electricity travels at the speed of light (the speed of light depends on what it’s traveling through)
It’s not instantaneous either. If you and your friend sit in separate cars where you can see each other while talking on the phone, you will witness a real time game lag 🙂
Your voice creates vibrations in the air.
these vibrations are picked up by the microphone.
Then microphone/mobile technical wizardry converts the sound into a microwave signal (light) which bounces around a few satellites to get around the world.
This microwave signal reaches the other phone and the process happens in reverse to get the sound back.
Light travels roughly at 300 million metres/second so it appears instantaneous.
If you were trying to chat to someone on the moon there would be a couple seconds delay because of the distances between the two.
This person is reaaaaally not getting that it stops travelling as “sound” when it changes form.
>It’s technically still sound though right?
Sound displaces a medium (air, water, anything PHYSICAL). A vinyl record is not sound. When it is converted to a signal it is still not a sound. When that signal is connected to a speaker it displaces air and becomes sound. A signal in a wire or a radio wave or a fiber optic cable is not displacing a physical medium that ears or any sensory organs can detect.
Essentially, we’re “recording” the sound on one end using your microphone. Now it’s just data, like a music file on an MP3 player, so we transmit it to the other person. Then, their phone’s speaker takes that data and plays the sound out loud.
>Edit: It’s technically still sound though right? Just converted into something else.
Just because it’s converted into a different form doesn’t mean it’s not sound.
No. Sound is vibration in the air. What is transmitted across the world is electricity (and light in fiber optics), not sound.
Microphones have moving parts in them that move/vibrate when they are exposed to sound. These tiny movements cause small changes in the voltage of the electrical circuit. Those subtle changes in voltage are then amplified and transmitted around the world.
Those voltage changes are then used to make the magnets in the speakers on the other side move, which produces sound. The sound the speakers produce is not the original sound, but an imitation of it.
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